Simplify!

I have had this lettering over my stove for a couple years, but I never really thought about it. It was a free gift for attending a friend's vinyl lettering party, so I put it up and pretty much stopped seeing it.

Then a couple weeks ago I got a book from our tiny little library called Simplify Your Life with Kids. The author, Elaine St. James, also wrote Living the Simple Life, and some parts of SYLwK seem to me like she is reaching for ways to write another book. I'm in a section now that's a lot of various parenting advice (i.e. use logical consequences) that are useful, but not what I was looking for in this book. But it started out great! There was one part near the beginning that has been, at least for now, life changing for me!

The author talks about how stuff complicates our lives. We spend our time & money going out to buy stuff, then bring it home and have to find a place for it. Then over the years, regardless of how useful the stuff is, we have to keep cleaning and organizing and dedicating space to this stuff. It really rang a bell with me, and I've been on a decluttering kick lately.

Saturday I cleaned out my entire kitchen! I have a whole bunch of stuff to take to DI now. There were all these things in the kitchen that, on previous organizing sweeps, I thought "I might use that someday." My new thought process is "Do I use this enough to make it worth the space it takes up?" And there were a lot of No's to that question! For example, I had 2 round cake pans that I haven't used in years. My mom uses hers for biscuits, but I make mine on cookie sheets. Once a couple years ago Dan made me a two layer cake with them, but I think that was the last time they did anything other than make it hard to get stuff in & out of my cupboards. There may be a day in the future when we wish we still had them. But I have decided that that does not justify their space in my kitchen in the meantime.

The bathroom was next. I have this little storage caddy that holds most things I use on a daily basis. It has two different sets of three eye shadows - one set of browns, one set of purples. Those are the only ones I use. But I had an entire drawer full of other make up, including probably 10+ other eye shadows! I must admit that I didn't throw out ALL the other make up, but I threw away a lot of it!

In talking to my friend Gayelinn yesterday I realized that one of the reasons I finally feel okay doing this is money. We're far from rich, but we are finally at a point where Dan makes more than we spend (as long as I follow the budget, of course...). So if I throw away 10 eyeshadows, and later realize that I really do wish I had 1 of them, I can go buy a new one. I no longer have to hold onto every single thing we might ever need so that we won't have to spend a couple dollars if I happen to throw out one thing that we do actually need some day.

I don't know how long this kick will last, but it feels really good right now. All of my cupboards are so much more organized, and it's so much easier to keep them that way when I'm not trying to jam too much stuff in them! One of the biggest reasons we've been wanting to move (after the main one of wanting more bedrooms, and possibly because Dan might be getting a job in Portland, cross your fingers!) is to have more storage space. I felt like I didn't have enough cupboards in the kitchen. Um, no, I just had too much stuff! Even if we do ever sell our house, I don't want to just keep hauling around all this junk! Society believes that more = better, but it is only true up to a point! Once you have what you need, more is not better, it's worse!

Time for me to stop rambling and get back to work!